Friday, March 28, 2008

BA training fiasco

It's not often that training gets into the national press, but there were stories galore today about Heathrow's Terminal 5 fiasco, with 72 flights cancelled, luggage lunacies and staff who clearly had no idea how to cope either the processes or problems.

This was reported by the BBC: "BA claimed 'staff familiarisation' was to blame and the staff blamed the lack of training and the essential support that was promised. During the inadequate training days prior to the opening, any staff questions were bounced back with 'I don't know' and 'It will be clear on the day'."

Despite the huge sums spent on architecture and build BA ad BAA clearly have no idea how to handle the training problems. I was on the tube coming back from Heathrow last night and had mad passengers and BA staff all talking about 'a nightmare', 'never again'. Depressing.

A few choice comments from pasesengers.....

"If BAA ever invite me to a boozy celebration I shall be very careful to check that the address they give for the event isn't a brewery."

"This debacle is all the more astounding by BAs failure to manage the crisis properly. While we can accept problems are sometimes inevitable, the total lack of customer care in asking passengers to make their own hotel and alternate flight arrangements is unacceptable. They need to be taught that they cannot treat their customers in such a cavalier fashion without a backlash. Where was the fallback plans if there was one and why didnt that work?This is poor management at its very worst!"

"THEY SHOULD HAVE broke the staff gently in, not move the majority of all flights there in one day, have a month or more testing of the systems"

"They couldn't just have a ramp up period to iron out teething problem could they? No they had to big-bang it and guess what? Its blown up in their faces. Over-confident and over zealous management..with perhaps their eye just on the bottom line. Someone needs to be fired....oh wait this in England being ripped off, incompetant and foolish gets you a promotion!"